After talking to Joi and the other guys in #joiito, I decided that so appallingly inaccurate was Seth Schiesel 's piece on IRC, that it warranted an email to his editor, Kevin McKenna.

Below is my email to Mr McKenna, and the incisive response I received from the New York Times.


Dear Mr McKenna,

I am writing regarding the article The Internet's Wilder Side, by S Schiesel, published at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/06/technology/circuits/06chat.html.

Mr Schiesel seems to not only be somewhat behind the times - IRC has been around for at least 15 years, far longer than Napster or P2P - but also rather ill-informed about both the positive uses for IRC and the fundamental issues underpinning its less savoury uses.

The arguments Mr Schiesel puts forward against IRC are specious at best. At the end of the day, IRC is just one medium for communication amongst many, like messageboards, blogs, websites, sms and phones. To call it the 'wild west' and to imply that the only people who use IRC are 'pirates' and 'hackers' is not only hyperbole, it's also wrong, as any regular user of, say, #joiito (Joichi Ito's IRC channel) could tell you.

Mr Schiesel also fails to tackle the key issues underlying hacking, illegal file sharing and porn, which are far more important than the manner in which hackers and file sharers communicate. These issues include the concepts of free culture as discussed by Lawrence Lessig, the way in which software houses are failing in their fiduciary duty to provide their customers with secure software and operating systems, and the lack of appropriate resources being brought to bear against child porn rings.

These questions are complex and not answered by a simplistic attack on IRC, which is perhaps why your correspondent failed to address them.

You should also consider that such articles reflect poorly upon the NY Times. Your credibility as a source of informed news within the tech/net arena is damaged by such poorly researched and badly written pieces and you risk appearing to be scaremongering for the sake of it.

I hope that you will redress the balance by publishing a feature which gives a more balanced view of IRC, both what it is and what it can achieve as a communications and networking tool. I would be only too happy to write that feature for you.

If you would like to read my current response to Mr Schiesel's piece, you can do so on my blog at http://chocnvodka.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2004/5/6/52697.html

Yours sincerely,


Suw Charman
http://chocnvodka.blogware.com/


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Dear Ms. Charman:

Thank you for your letter to the Circuits section of The New York Times. In the hope that we will have room for it in a future Letters column, may I ask you for your town of residence? We print each letter writer’s town of residence beneath his/her signature.

Sincerely, Nancy Kenney, Circuits